


at last I laid down my sadness

by LittleRaven



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Death, F/M, Force Ghost Anakin Skywalker, Force Ghost(s), Major Character Undeath
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-01
Updated: 2018-12-01
Packaged: 2019-09-02 23:21:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16796725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleRaven/pseuds/LittleRaven
Summary: He waits on her.





	at last I laid down my sadness

**Author's Note:**

  * For [silveronthetree](https://archiveofourown.org/users/silveronthetree/gifts).



> Title from _Keturah and Lord Death_ by Martine Leavitt.

When Ahsoka meets him again, she lifts her white-clad arm in greeting. He smiles, hoping; he draws close. The air hums with him, buzzes. He approaches, but she is silent, and he waits on her. 

“Anakin.” She smiles, small, solemn, he’s full from it—before she bids him goodbye. 

After he has looked upon his son, met with Obi-Wan, Anakin goes back. The ashes of his suit have gone up and faded into the atmosphere of Endor’s moon. Vader is past, and he is present. He goes back, following the murmur of her presence away, to a ship between suns. “Hey,” he starts. He stops. She looks at him. He looks back. She cannot be surprised at his presence. He reaches for her, knowing he is a ghost, knowing she can feel him anyway; he is thrown back, bouncing off a wall—she watches him through the glass of it and he can see the tightness of her face, but he cannot read beyond it. 

He watches her. She is on Lothal. The knowledge prickles; he remembers how she’d found him in the fields of space around it, how he’d found her back. The coldness is intangible now, a memory, but he can still feel her recoil, how the knowledge had been an electrocution swifter and better than the Dark Side lightning he could never conjure. He watches her leave, not alone, and she doesn’t look back at Lothal. A moment later, neither does he. 

She is putting a hand on this boy’s shoulder—a man, but he sees the boy she’d struck him down for in the edges of his presence. Anakin gives them time. They are bright together in the Force, and he doesn’t break away until she withdraws her touch. 

He follows her to a spring in this old forgotten world made new with discovery. Her steps are silent in the green woods, but he has never needed to hear to know her. 

“You never do learn when you aren’t needed.” She is tired, and that gives her words the sting. Ahsoka sighs. “I left you, and you left me alone. And now you’re here.”

The acknowledgment is enough. Anakin approaches once more. “Now I’m here.” He stands before her. “I didn’t know you were alive.” He doesn’t say what he would have done if he had. He doesn’t know—he never had, until he was lifting to strike and break the gaze before which he had managed to hide—he knows this much now, to let the truth of it surface. He had broken under the weight of her eyes, and all his justifications with it, and he had sought to break her in turn. He had regretted it, in the rubble where he could not find her body, but he had chosen to use it, to stoke the fire of his rage; her fault, her everlasting refusal to take what he offered even as he laid it at her feet, the way she looked at him when he called, his name in her mouth when she turned away from her own rage. How she looked at him and made promises she was already betraying, when she’d refused him already, in her look and her voice and the steady light of her. How she had looked at him.

She still does, and it feeds a different kind of fire. “I miss you.” He has been missing her for a very long time. 

Ahsoka lowers her head, but he can see the tears, would feel them regardless. She shakes as she raises it up again, and when he wraps himself around her, lets her take what warmth he can provide, she tells him, “Good.”


End file.
